'This is Megan Abbott working at the absolute height of her talent' Attica Locke

Bestselling and award-winning author Megan Abbott's revelatory and mesmerising new novel set against the hothouse of a family-run ballet studio.

With their long necks and matching buns and pink tights, Dara and Marie Durant have been dancers since birth. Growing up, they were trained by their glamorous mother, founder of the Durant School of Dance. After their parents' death in a tragic accident, the sisters began running the school together, along with Charlie, Dara's husband and once their mother's prized student. Marie, warm and soft, teaches the younger students; Dara, with her precision, trains the older ones; and Charlie, back broken after years of injuries, rules over the back office. Circling around each other, the three have perfected a dance, six days a week, that keeps the studio thriving. But when a suspicious accident occurs, just at the onset of the school's annual performance of The Nutcracker, a season of competition, anxiety, and exhilaration, an interloper arrives and threatens the sisters' delicate balance.

'Abbott creates a dark and mesmerising world' Harriet Tyce

'A dreamy, sexy, a deep dive into a subculture . . . You feel the characters' aches and pains in your joints, your feet and, most dangerous of all, your heart' Laura Lippman